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Many people think the flavored latte they grab before work originated years ago in Italy or France, or possibly at Starbucks. In actuality, flavored lattes are a recent invention, created in Caffe Trieste on a rainy day in San Francisco, after someone pointed to a bottle of Torani syrup and asked, “What is that? Can I try a drink with that?”

Torani started in 1925 as a small family operation run by an Italian-American couple with a handful of recipes for flavored Italian soda syrup. They sold the first bottles of Torani syrup to stores near their home in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. Now, almost 100 years later, Torani is an internationally distributed company that boasts a product range of over 200 flavors of syrups, sauces, and more. Customers can find its iconic red-yellow-and-blue label on the shelves of coffee shops, restaurants, and kitchen counters worldwide.

Despite incredible growth, Torani remains ambitious. Its next step is to expand to new markets and distribution channels, with the intention of doubling revenue by 2025. To reach this goal, Torani plans to elevate marketing campaigns and sales strategy and increase customer engagement worldwide.

As the company grew, Torani found its legacy systems couldn’t keep up. Sticky notes and spreadsheets limited communication across teams and regions, and because Torani has many sales teams working independently from different regions, it was difficult for headquarters to understand what was happening in each one. Sylvie Mwila-Jonath, Head of IT, said, “Obviously, the sales teams meet every week. But from a day-to-day standpoint, it was really hard to see what people were doing and track activity across the entire team.” The disparate sales organizations coupled with the siloed data prevented Torani from having a comprehensive understanding of its teams and its customers. Because of Torani’s people-centric culture and values, this lack of information quickly became a problem. That’s when the company began using Salesforce.

With Sales Cloud, Torani can manage all U.S. deals with less than 40 sales reps. It started off by integrating Salesforce into Outlook to manage contacts, but the company now uses Sales Cloud to oversee opportunity management, pipeline management, and reports and dashboards. After implementing Chatter to cover internal correspondence, Salesforce now facilitates employee collaboration as well.

Salesforce keeps a record of every customer communication and interaction, so Torani has a 360-degree view of every customer and every case. “I’m happy to say, now everybody can see information about different accounts and how they’re doing,” said Mwila-Jonath. With visibility into the company and its customers, Torani can keep track of its customer relationships as it explores new sales opportunities and marketing strategies.

Salesforce also facilitates collaboration within Torani. Mwila-Jonath explains, “Collaboration has gotten a lot better than it was, and not just within the sales department. Anyone who is connected to Chatter can see what’s going on if there’s a campaign. There’s been a noticeable increase in productivity and engagement because our team members are more aware of what’s going on, because they’re able to share what they know and contribute to different projects.”

Torani’s other big growth goal is increasing customer engagement with direct consumers. The vast majority of Torani’s sales comes from big retail customers, importers, and national accounts, who then distribute products to individual buyers. “Even if the consumer or the cafe operators are not buying directly from us, we want to be able to have a relationship with them, because ultimately, they’re the ones who are consuming the product we make,” said Mwila-Jonath. To that end, Torani engages with fans on social media by showcasing recipes using Torani products. “It’s all about customer experience. It’s about how Torani loves consumers, and consumers love Torani.”

Using Social Studio, Torani can build relationships directly with its community of consumers by engaging with them in personal and creative ways. With Pardot, Torani creates personalized, targeted email campaigns that generate marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), which are automatically assigned to regional sales reps to continue their success with distributors.

Torani started blazing a trail with Salesforce in 2010 with Sales Cloud. Now it’s expanded use of Salesforce to Marketing Cloud, Pardot, and Service Cloud. With so many products being used, Torani is turning to Trailhead to make implementation and learning easy. “With all these different platforms we’re adding, we’re trying to absorb as much knowledge and information as we possibly can. One way I felt was a good way to do it was just to sign up in Trailhead and take as many trails as I possibly can,” said Mwila-Jonath.

To meet its goals for expansion, Torani needs a platform that can scale with its development, instead of limiting its potential. “When the company is smaller, everything is manageable. You can put things into Excel. You can have a very simple system of doing things. Now, we need a collaboration platform where everybody can go,” said Mwila-Jonath.

As Salesforce unifies all Torani’s organizations, customer and company data is available to every team. “From my standpoint, I’m looking at creating a platform that’s scalable, which we can continue to use 10 years from now,” said Mwila-Jonath. With a connected platform, Torani can collaborate like never before, and expand its business as a result. “We needed a tool that could bring us all together. Ultimately, that landed us with Salesforce.”

Traditionally, retail shoppers started their purchase journey in a physical store. More recently, those same shoppers are using both online and offline starting points. For adidas, the website is now the dominant channel, with more and more consumers starting their journey digitally.

During the most recent holiday season, for example, a significant share of revenue in the US came from millennial shoppers, almost every one of whom started the purchase journey online, according to Jacqueline Smith-Dubendorfer, VP, Digital Experience Design.

This evolution from brick-and-mortar retail to digital commerce has enormous implications for companies trying to keep up with people’s changing preferences. For adidas, it meant prioritizing the digital experience by investing in a suite of Salesforce products, including Commerce Cloud and Service Cloud. It’s an investment with tremendous upside, as the shift to digital provides opportunities for adidas to get closer to consumers and understand each one individually.

With Service Cloud, adidas empowers its staff of 1,100 care agents to deliver faster, smarter service in whichever format consumers prefer — phone, email, web, or social — all from a single application. As a result, customer service is more efficient for the company and, crucially, more personalized and convenient for consumers.

Commerce Cloud has enabled adidas to rapidly form relationships with shoppers anywhere in the world. Today, the company runs more than 50 stores across more than 40 countries, and can create, manage, and update its global presence quickly and easily, cascading changes across properties with a few simple clicks.

Smith-Dubendorfer credits Salesforce with giving adidas the ability to treat consumers as individuals, and answer key questions about the customer in each interaction: Do we know this person? Where did they come from? What are they interested in?

“Those data points then enable us to adapt what we present, when we present it, and how we present it to ensure that we deliver as close to what that customer is looking for as we can,” said Smith-Dubendorfer.

Beyond simply presenting information or content to a shopper, adidas uses its knowledge of individual consumers — and their preferences, gained through Commerce Cloud — to create better products and, in an increasing number of cases, even custom-made products. These products can be manufactured on the fly and delivered to consumers remarkably fast.

By allowing shoppers to build custom products, executive leaders at adidas know they’re opening up their brand and relinquishing control to consumers — an expected result of putting consumers at the center of its business.

The Salesforce Platform has been integral to this process, because it creates the digital interface that enables the company to engage with shoppers. “Salesforce has a unique positioning with best-in-class platforms across an array of areas from commerce to marketing to service. The powerful part is when those solutions start to be interconnected, at a data layer and at a capability layer," said Godsey.

The consumer-centric, digital-first strategy that adidas has been pursuing is now paying dividends with record-breaking growth at a time when the retail industry is struggling. In 2016, the company’s overall sneaker sales grew substantially. Around that time, the company announced 24% currency-neutral growth in North America for its brands, and reported a 59% increase in ecommerce globally, which equated to approximately €1 billion in online sales.

The adidas digital channel, powered by Salesforce, is essential to the company’s growth and future success, according to Smith-Dubendorfer. “The scale and consistency at which we're able to deliver and bring our brand to life is incredibly important,” she said. “And the partnership we have with Salesforce has enabled us to do that across many, many markets. It is enabling us to be faster to market, to deliver better experiences quicker, and to drive scale and consistency in a way we weren't able to do before.”

Originally a brick-and-mortar retailer, adidas quickly became an ecommerce champion. How? By prioritizing the digital experience and investing in a suite of Salesforce products that allow the company to get much closer to consumers.